Garden Supply & Community Feedstore
— Mix the troubled economy with the desire to eat healthy food – and what do you get? A backyard turned into a barnyard. Here’s a look at the growing world of urban farming. The farm is a small backyard behind a pink house. It’s …
Many of us try to do our part for the environment: we recycle, bike to work, or buy eco friendly cleaners. The ladies of Biofuel Oasis, however, have gone beyond what most of us would ever dream of trying in their war against pollution. Melissa …
The Biodevas / The Environmentalists
This spring, in the weeks before opening what they call the “most sustainable filling station in the nation,” the owners of Biofuel Oasis in Berkeley were smoothing gravel in trenches they had dug themselves. In one trench, they had laid pipe to carry the biodiesel—made from recycled cooking oil—from a storage tank to their station’s two new fuel pumps.
The term “sweat equity” certainly applies to the effort these eco-entrepreneurs have put into refurbishing a historic 1933 gas station on Ashby Avenue. Because their worker-owned collective has a limited budget, they have done much of the trench digging and other construction themselves.
“We learned to do all this crazy man stuff,” says Novella Carpenter, who, like her four sister “biodevas,” has a white-collar day job—she’s a journalist. (Their spelling of devas is a nod to forest spirits.) “We’re all in much better shape. We call it the Oasis gym.”
Continue reading Diablo Magazine – Women to Watch
SFUnzipped takes it to the streets with StylePhiles — where we talk to real people about how they pull their look together. Last Thursday, The fabulous BioDevas of Berkeley’s BioFuel Oasis threw a fundraising Happy Hour at Trumer Pils Brewery to raise cash for their …
We’re among others featured in this beautiful photo essay by Célia Pernot http://www.celiapernot.com/G_biodiesel/G_biodiesel_01.html
September 2008 — Co-op America
As reported in our fuel-ranking chart in a recent issue of the Co-op America Quarterly, the use of virgin materials for biofuels can’t be a sustainable replacement for our society’s reliance on fossil fuels. Waste oil for fuel, however, is another matter entirely, and is one of the very best sources of fuel available today.
That’s why BioFuel Oasis has had a commitment to selling fuel produced in the greenest way possible – from waste – since the very beginning. We asked Margaret Farrow, one of the worker-owners at BioFuel Oasis to tell us more about recycling used restaurant oil into fuel, and about Biofuel Oasis’s future plans, including their construction of a new all-solar facility landscaped by indigenous edible and medicinal plants. Continue reading Fueling Green Machines
Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal – by Emma Ritch
Austin Mader-Clark of Autopia Biofuels has teamed up with two other biodiesel station owners to promote the alternative fuel.
Austin Mader-Clark’s new fueling station and convenience store in San Mateo is in the red, yet she makes time to confer with her competition weekly.
That collaboration is critical to the success of the fledgling industry, she said.
Three women-owned biodiesel stations — Mader-Clark’s Autopia Biofuels LLC, BioFuel Oasis Cooperative Inc. in Berkeley and Dogpatch Biofuels Cooperative Inc. in San Francisco — are establishing a consortium that could help them improve pricing, government regulation and public opinion.